Moreover, the ethical and religious values of the person himself, as constituted by and founded upon his response to the value (of a good), are essentially outside his field of vision. Because they are built up by the person’s response to value, they do not themselves enter his consciousness in his experience of the values which elicit his response. The self values thus displayed remain, as it were, on the margin of his consciousness; their presence is but indirectly signalized by the interior peace and luminous harmony that brighten his soul in the act of responding to the values whose call he experiences. As soon as our glance alights upon the ethical value of our moral action or value-response itself, we lose contact with the value (of the good) referred to in that act or response; and with that contact disappears the ethical value of our attitude: the more we admire it the more thoroughly it disappears.

Hence, it is strictly impossible in the same act to refer our value-response to the value of our own response in a given case. Even with respect to our own attitudes in the past, it is not possible to look at their value and to take delight in them. It is not impossible to display an ethically valuable behavior and later to reflect upon it with satisfaction; yet even this is destructive of value and inconsistent with humility. For it still severs our contact with the value to which our original moral attitude, the object of our subsequent contemplation, was referred and devoted; it therefore undermines our moral continuity with the subject of our past action, reducing the memory of our accomplishment to an empty shell whose content of value has evaporated.

The humble man remains ever conscious of his own imperfections

More than that, far from relishing or even pondering over his own values, the truly humble person is likely to look upon himself, after the example of many saints, as the greatest sinner. For he is most keenly aware of the gratuitousness of the grace he has received; and the higher he has risen objectively, the more clearly he sees the abyss that separates him from the infinite holiness of God. He measures his station, not by what he represents absolutely but by the distance between what he has received from God and what he has actually accomplished. Nay, it is inherent in ethical perfection to be constantly advancing towards Christ and never to attribute to one’s moral status a completeness which would give one the feeling of being the possessor of a value. Humility does not prevent a person from seeing that, with God’s help, he has been making progress in some direction; but he must never lose sight of the essential relativity of that progress. The determination never to cease advancing—a process that has no term in statu viae—is one of the basic conditions of holiness.